The beauty and power of Web 2.0 is in it’s collaborative nature. We are able to benefit from the expertise of those around us.
The sad and unfortunate truth in many schools is that we work in isolation, trapped in our classrooms, our departments, our sections, our schools or our districts.
After a weekend conference at our school, I was inspired to use the former to combat the latter. Collaborating with another teacher, I’ve implemented a school-wide wiki - available only on our portal, unfortunately - to share practices of differentiation. There are areas for differentiating by readiness, interest, or learning profile. Within each of these three categories, teachers can add resources to help with diagnostics, content, process, product or affect differentiation.
I’ve modeled the concept on that of a Creative Commons license, without referring to it as such.. Specifically, “there is only one rule: If you modify an existing resource, please add your new creation to the wiki so that another teacher may benefit from your work.”
If there is one thing I’ve heard from teachers, it’s that they want concrete
examples of how to implement change in their classrooms. This is an opportunity to provide those concrete examples for each other. I hope that some of us can lead by example, easily and freely sharing and distributing our best-practice. I hope that somebody else will come along, take my work and make it better. And I hope they share it with me again.
Together Everyone can Achieve More
Photos:
“driveby tree” by Lorrie McClanahan
“The World at my Fingertips” by Jill Greenseth
